The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective

In this article I discuss processes through which the values of cultural forms are formulated, maintained and communicated across social populations. My empirical focus is the emergence and spread of a prestige register of spoken British English,…

Centuries before the creation of archaeology as a scientific discipline in the modern West, indigenous people in Mesoamerica developed their own interpretations for the physical remains of their past. This study draws on archaeological,…

This article re-reads Marx's account of the commodity as a socio-natural entity. In doing so, it re-evaluates the status of the political (as opposed to questions of political economy) in Marx's analysis and also reads his argument in light of…

How many times has your PC crashed today? While Gordon Moore's now famous law projecting the doubling of computer power every 18 months has more than borne itself out, it's too bad that a similar trajectory projecting the reliability and usefulness…

In this article we define and illustrate sociophonetic variation within speech, highlighting both its pervasiveness and also the relatively minor role it has played in the development of phonetic and phonological theory. Reviewing evidence from…

Centuries before the creation of archaeology as a scientific discipline in the modern West, indigenous people in Mesoamerica developed their own interpretations for the physical remains of their past. This study draws on archaeological,…

Contends that the social context of our evolutionary past has led humans to develop motives that have important social components, and proposes that this social context facilitated 5 core social motives: to belong, to understand, to be effective, to…

"Of the 120 species of birds in the corvid family, which includes the crows, ravens, magpies and jays, the bare-faced rook is perhaps the most social of them all"

In this paper we reframe the creation of information visualizations as a kind of interface design, where visualizations provide people with an interface onto a dataset in such a way that they can generate, understand, and ultimately communicate…

Documents are evolving as means for structuring and navigating information space, and resources for constructing and negotiating social space.